The Worm Hole

HTML5 Video. Who needs Flash?

Nobody it seems, at least not for video. Almost unbelievably in the space of a year, Flash the once ubiquitous format for all web-based video, has become surplus to requirements. Shunned by Microsoft in favour of Silverlight and by other browsers in favour of HTML5. Significantly, now that Opera has joined the ranks of HTML5 video supporting browsers none of the top 5 browsers now require the Flash plugin to play video.

It seems this fact has not been lost on the web development community, with a slew of demos and plugins being released over the last few weeks. One of the first to cause a stir was the excellent SublimeVideo player. Not to be outdone the Ambilight player shows what can be achieved when you integrate HTML5 video with canvas. Video affecting other parts of a web-page, who knew that was even possible?

There’s also been some progress on fallbacks for non supporting browsers. Earlier this week Dave Hall released a ‘patch’ for those browsers that don’t support video natively. This was shortly followed by the release a jQueryless modification by Remy Sharp. This is great news as it means that we can use the <video> tag right now!

But they kept coming. Mario Fischer making an excellent post on how to use HTML5 video with Mootools.

Hot on his heels Michael Dale came out with a HTML5 Video plugin for jQuery. Something close to our hearts here at Happyworm, having made something similar for <audio>.

They say a week is a long time in politics, but this seems doubly true of HTML5 right now. Things are moving apace and they are moving towards a richer web, increasingly less reliant on third-party plugins.

Exciting times indeed.

Mark B

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